Prominent People in Your Community: Keith Hoskins
| Published: 20th June 2007 15:55 |
Keith Hoskins is Hitchin's Town Centre Manager and he runs the Hitchin Initiative town centre partnership. 2007 marks his 10th anniversary in the role.
Where were you born?
Bromley in Kent in 1951.
Where were you educated and what was your first job?
I moved from Kent to Berkshire when I was 8 and went to Ranelagh School in Bracknell. I left with two A levels - English and History. I did do Geography as well but I didn't do so well at that. I can find my way around though!
My first job was for John Lewis at Waitrose, who have now become members of this Partnership. So life turns full circle!
Is your background entirely in retail?
Yes, essentially. I went into leisure management for a while, but then in 1983 started my own retail business in the Thames Valley and grew that through the 80s. My first shop was in Wokingham, where I lived a lot of my life. It was a music shop that we opened just as CDs were launched, so it grew very quickly because national multiples were hedging their bets and not stocking them at the time. They always let the independents take the risk and then come in and take the cream off the cake!
Then came the big recession of the early 90s and it ended up cheaper for me to buy our stock from Woolworths next door than from major record companies. We couldn't compete so we gradually closed the shops down, finally going bang in 1993. Nine of the 11 years we were open were a great deal of fun though and we got free tickets for some great acts during the 80s!
It was also in 1993 that because of the trading pressure in the town of Wokingham we started up Wokingham Town Centre Management. We started with something called Wokingham Independent Trading Society - the acronym was WITS because we were at our wits' end! It was borne out of attrition with the local authority who had put car-parking charges up quite considerably. We campaigned reasonably effectively against them and were invited to the council to discuss issues such as these. And when you actually sit round the table you realise that there is more that unites than divides and that the public and private sectors are actually all striving towards the same end result, which is the economic vitality of our communities. So we're better working in partnership towards that than slagging each other off quite frankly!
Isn't there some feeling that the NHDC is currently neglecting Hitchin and that Hitchin should have its own Town Council?
I think that is the perception from a lot of local community groups in respect of highly prominent isolated issues where they think the local council isn't delivering as it should do. The problems we think of particularly are Hitchin Town Hall, Hitchin Market, Churchgate and the state of the public realm.
I don't think people quite understand the implications of a town council. We've never been particularly in favour of another tier of local government. You can have a town council, but really it doesn't have a huge amount of legislative power. And of course it costs to run a town council.
I also think that if a town council is born out of attrition with the existing levels of local authority then it doesn't get it off to a good start, as we've perhaps seen in Letchworth. So if you're going to go a town council route then it has to be with a very positive attitude in mind and not because people don't like what the district council are doing, which would be the entirely wrong way of doing it.
Town councils can only comment on planning issues - they don't have any statutory jurisdiction over them. If there were one then obviously we would want to engage with a town council and the private sector will work with whatever levels of public sector (council) there are. I think probably what we would prefer to see in an ideal world is for the Hitchin Committee of NHDC, which is made up of all the Hitchin councillors, to be delegated greater authority and budget from a central pot. They're a bunch of great councillors. In all my years I have never worked with such a committed and proactive bunch. I go to every Hitchin Committee and you look round the table and you listen to them speak and unless it's an election the following week when they get a bit ‘ansy' you wouldn't actually know which party they are. They're just all committed to doing their best for the town. And I think that's always reflected in election results.
I think Hitchin people seem to be more discerning. They actually recognise a good councillor when they see one and will vote for them regardless of party. And I think that's why, certainly in the last election, you got some different result in Hitchin than you got nationally really. And I think good councillors are certainly recognised as such and returned.
Aren't there already one or two groups that present the community's views to the District Council?
Yes, The Hitchin Society is probably the longest-standing one affiliated to the Civic Trust. And also the Hitchin Forum is very effective. Both of those are at the forefront as guardians of Hitchin's heritage.
I suppose Hitchin Initiative would take a slightly different view. Whilst we look to preserve the best of the past, we are looking towards the future as well. Hitchin is an evolving, living, breathing entity that needs to develop its potential, particularly with so much residential coming in, because otherwise it is never going to satisfy the aspirations of everyone who is moving to town. They might be commuters during the week, but environmentally the last thing we want is people coming to live here and then getting in their cars and driving to Milton Keynes, Stevenage or Bedford or wherever because they can't get the services and the shops that they want within their own town centre. What we want them to do is come here to live and love Hitchin so much that they don't want to leave it. So we have to make sure that we keep the range of goods and services and leisure and cultural facilities that make people content to stay here.
Going back to your earlier career, what did you do directly before becoming Hitchin Town Centre Manager?
When my business went bang I decided to come out of retailing altogether. I did the Home Office Exam and was an Immigration Officer at Terminal 4 for about 18 months. But during that time I retained my interest in the town centre partnership in Wokingham.
Then at the beginning of 1995 I was asked to do a part-time voluntary town centre manager's job and I decided to take two years out to do it, almost like a sabbatical. To pay the bills I also did work for various businesses around town - we were still in a recessionary time so lots of independent businesses couldn't afford full-time staff but needed somebody on specific or odd days of the week. The local jeweller had to take his son to hospital once a week so I helped out in the shop that day; once a week I helped out at the fireplace gallery so he could go out and do quotes; I did the monthly accounts for the florist and if it got busy I'd be out in the van delivering flowers; and a friend who ran a wine bar had to go to hospital so I was a maitre d' for four weeks and ended up staying there for years!
How did your current role as Hitchin Town Centre Manager come about?
I came up the Sunday before my interview just to scout around, as I'd only ever driven through Hertfordshire before. I remember thinking that Hitchin was a lovely town and that I'd be very lucky if I got invited to work here. It was all very coincidental. My two-year ‘sabbatical' was going to be up in June 1997, so the preceding Christmas I started to think about getting back into the work market and did a CV. I happened to pick up a Sunday Times in the January. It's not a paper I normally buy because I'm not a Murdoch fan, but I'm not wedded to a particular Sunday paper. If I see a story I want to read on the front page then I'll buy that paper. Anyway, in Situations Vacant I saw the boxed advert saying ‘Hitchin Town Centre Manager Required'. It was exactly what I was doing at the time so I made it my first application. I think four or five applicants got shortlisted and they asked me for an interview in March 1997. At the interview they said they'd ring me the next day, which they did and said they'd like me to do the job! So I started on 6 April 1997.
Do you like living in the Town Centre?
It's great being so close to everything. And of course I can walk to work, which is very environmentally friendly! But the difficulty is that you're never off duty. The minute you walk into the street somebody will want something, even late at night when I'm walking back home from a restaurant! It's not a problem though. It comes with the territory. It just means that every so often you do have to get out because otherwise you would suffocate.
I've actually found that being a National Mentor for the Association of Town Centre Management for the last couple of years has helped. It involves going to other towns and giving them advice and gets me into a different environment for a couple of days every two or three months. I've got the last one of those coming up next month in South Shields. It's actually very refreshing for me because whilst trying to assist with other towns' problems I sometimes get spin-off ideas that will help within Hitchin.
Do you ever get the chance to have a proper holiday?
Yes, although this year's a bit different. I've got the opportunity to go to New York in September for the four-day World Congress on Town Centre Management and I'll be spending a couple of days there before and after, which will certainly be interesting.
Then for the last couple of years I've gone to Edinburgh Fringe Festival, although with an eye to looking at street entertainment we might be able to use here. There was a really good comedy string trio we saw called Pluck - a violinist, a violist and a cellist. They would be playing classical music - Mozart or something like that - and then suddenly break into a dance routine whilst playing. Really clever! So we brought them here for two Christmases, but then they became so popular nationally that they became too expensive for us.
A couple of acts that have come to us via recommendation through Edinburgh are The Irish Writers Entertain (Neil O'Shea), who I haven't yet seen but will be at Hitchin Festival this year, and an absolutely superb accapella choir called Naked Voices based in Bristol who like last year will be doing a concert at St Mary's Church - a beautiful setting for this sort of event. It's set for December 8th and will be a fundraiser for the Christmas lights.
What is your favourite local event?
Anything I've not had to organise! But the Initiative is involved in so much!
Out of the things we do organise I'd say anything that's a bit different. This year for example we've had Sing-a-Long-a Sound of Music and Ascot Day at Ickleford. I also enjoy Hitchin Festival - there's a lot of work in collating it, but there are events that I haven't had to organise so I shall be going to some of those.
How many people attend Hitchin Festival?
It's very difficult to say because so much of it is free, such as the eight free lunchtime concerts at St Mary's Church this year. And of course Rhythms of the World is free and that's huge!
How involved is Hitchin Initiative with Rhythms of the World?
We don't actually have a lot to do with it other than to help them where we can. It's such a huge event now that there's a committee of 30+ that spend all year organising it. If we got involved in that in any big way then we'd never be able to do anything else!
During the ROTW weekend we actually tend to get the brickbats more than the bouquets, like complaints about toilet facilities, rubbish or the fact that somebody's used their doorway for unsavoury purposes! There are some retailers that just won't open on that Saturday now. If you're in food and drink then obviously it's a huge weekend. And there are lots of stalls that come in as well. But for general retail it's not good because your shoppers actually stay away - they know it's pointless coming into town because they won't get anywhere near it. Having said that, most retailers actually take a pretty positive view of it overall as it does raise Hitchin's profile to a huge range of people.
We've heard stories of people who have come to Hitchin for Rhythms of the World and loved it so much that they've moved here!
We're going to do a Fairtrade window for it this year because it's a bit difficult for such a small organisation to have a stall and man it all the time. Our office will only be open during our normal Saturday hours though and that will give us an opportunity to get out there and see what's going on. Or as the weekend's handed over to ROTW it's actually a weekend when I can relax quite well if I'm not around!
What phrase would you use to describe Hitchin?
The standard coverall is ‘Historic Market Town'. And I think the caveat to that these days would be ‘Historic Market Town Looking to the Future' because I don't think we can just sit and trade on our heritage, important though it is. We need to think about how we are evolving - about the future and where we want to be in 20 years time. And not just where we want to be in 20 years time, but where we want to be in 20 years time in relation to what's going on around us. It's no good saying we simply like ourselves as we are if we're going to have 10,000 houses west of Stevenage breathing down our neck! If that happens then we need to make sure that we get some economic benefit from it.
Wherever development comes, wherever Gordon Brown wants to develop his new towns or nuclear power stations or whatever, it's about providing what people want. Tourism isn't an issue that's high on any local authority agenda, so we as a business community have to take over part of that. People don't realise that we've got the Queen Mother Theatre and the Market Theatre - two theatres in a town this size is incredible! We've a huge diversity of music in the town. We've a great café culture, although I know that can have its downside of an evening as well if that evolves into a pub culture. But we've not got a huge nightclub per se culture as Stevenage for instance.
The thing is there are always going to be different issues affecting different sectors of the community. Residents aren't going to like certain aspects of businesses carrying on later hours for instance. And that would also impact on things like street cleaning - if you've got a lot of late-night businesses then you'll have the issue of getting the street cleaned by 9am ready for the daytime businesses who don't want to see all sorts of unsavoury substances on their pavements!
So there are clashes between sectors of a vibrant town, and my job's about managing that and managing everybody's aspirations. What you try to do is to find some common ground. If you can get sectors of the community to act on what is common in the first instance and get some immediate action on what unites everybody, then you can turn to look at some of the issues where there are discrepancies and say well OK we're going to need good old British compromise here.
Nobody will get absolutely everything they want. And this is why I think we're bogged down on things like Churchgate because we are never going to satisfy everybody's aspirations on it.
And what is the latest on the redevelopment of the Churchgate shopping area?
I really don't know. We've been in discussions and consultations about it all the time I've been here! You'd have to talk to NHDC who own all that land.
The owner of Churchgate, a development company called Hammersmatch, has about 90 years remaining on its lease so I think there is an onus on the local authority to include it in any planning scheme. But Hammersmatch have owned it since about 2000 and they're probably getting a bit tired of hanging around, as they can't let their property on commercial leases because they don't know when or if there's going to be a redevelopment.
At one point during my 10 years there were around 14 empty units out of the 23 in Churchgate. To his credit the current owner has filled them by letting them at probably below market rates. The tenants there won't say they're on good rates, but in comparison to the rest of the town they aren't too bad. But of course neither the tenants nor the landlord are prepared to invest money into it because they've no idea what the freeholder - the district council - wants out of it.
The district council on the other hand keeps listening to this pressure group and that pressure group and these people and those people and there is a paralysis of inaction, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. What do we do? What do we do?
We are all at the stage now where we're saying for goodness sake just do something! Even if the council were to say they're simply going to leave Churchgate as it is as at least then we'd all know where we stood and the landlord and tenants could decide to invest in their business, put a new carpet down, redecorate or whatever.
The problem as I foresee it is that the market is run down and needs some big investment in it. And I think that investment could come from a private sector developer. There is huge pressure on town centre space at the moment and yet there's a beautiful site there by the river that is empty four days of the week!
The council are actually looking to pass over the running of the market, and people have been asked to tender for its operation. We're certainly looking at it, but wouldn't be happy to take it over as it is on a long-term basis because it suffers vandalism, is intimidating at night - everybody who parks in St Mary's Square and walks through it to use the restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars is walking through something that really is pretty grotty - and it isn't particularly attractive in a design sense. Its big corrugated iron-type roofs aren't open to CCTV coverage so you don't know what's going on below them, and underneath the big carousels you've got lots of netting because otherwise the pigeons would go up there and roost and you'd get pigeon crap falling on the stalls. It's just not nice.
So ideally we would like to see it redone completely. It would have to be reinvented, and I think the market traders themselves know they need to be reinvented to a certain extent. In this day and age when technology is so much better there's no reason why like so many other towns we can't put a really good market together that perhaps has some permanent stalls for those that need that sort of lock-up facility, but with the bulk of it being on demountables.
Anyway, we need to bring some certainty to all this now. The leader of the council, Councillor F J Smith, has assured the businesses of Hitchin that he intends to see this sorted one way or another this year, and I've no reason to doubt this because he's very committed to it. We would just like it to have been done 5 or 6 years ago!
It certainly seems to have been dragging on!
If there is a particular skill of town centre management, I think it's marrying the aspirations of the public and private sectors. Encouraging one and spurring the other along. If you're in business, as you are, and you want something done you simply pick the phone up and get it done. Within the local authority, however, there has to be a reporting procedure, a committee procedure, a financial procedure and everything else. So you are managing the expectations of the business community with the ability of the public sector to deliver. You're reigning in the private sector saying well hang on you know this has to go through the procedures, whilst trying to urge on the public sector saying look this has been going on for a while, can't we get something done about it. And you hope that the two of them are going to match somewhere in the middle. It doesn't always work though!
What's your favourite part of Hitchin?
Gosh that's a difficult one! Different parts for different reasons. In the town centre it would obviously be St Mary's because it's such an iconic building. It's just lovely by the river there and I love the historic core around it.
Further afield, Oughtenhead Common is lovely. And Hitchwood's fantastic when the bluebells are out. And so are the fields at Cadwell Farm at Ickleford when the lavender's out - it was lovely to bring the lavender industry back to town and they've got about 12 acres of it now. And of course there are some nice pubs out in the country as well - Gosmore is lovely.
There are some very nice places within a short distance and I'd recommend the Hitchin Riverside Walks leaflet which covers about 13 or 14 miles and will take you out to the likes of Charlton, Bury Mead Springs and Oughtenhead Common.
What local clubs or organisations do you belong to?
Rotary. It's made up of men and women in the business community and its whole ethos is about businesses putting something back into the community. It does a huge amount of work in Hitchin, such as the Hitchin Hospital Garden Party and Hitchin Health Fair, and it's incredible that a town this size now has four Rotary clubs! Cherry and I go to the Friday morning breakfast club, which is about 65 strong.
I'm also on the Fairtrade Committee - Hitchin was Hertfordshire's first Fairtrade town, which was very good. I dip in and out of things like the Hitchin Historical Society and I'm a member of Friends of the British Schools. I try to do some work with Hitchin Forum when I can, and the Hitchin Society and all the various civic groups. And the Chamber of Commerce of course.
I also get to the Market Theatre or the Queen Mother for the odd production - the adult panto is a must-do!
Do you have a little-known fact about Hitchin that you would like to share?
Well there's the connection with the Queen Mother Theatre - her childhood home was at St Paul's Walden and she took dancing lessons at the Sun Hotel in Hitchin and some of her education took place in Dacre Road. Quite a bizarre thought is that when Henry VIII stayed at the Sun Hotel, or it might have been at the Angel Vaults Inn which used to be next to it, there was a fire and he escaped into Sun Street in his nightshirt. Some say with no clothes on at all!
And it amazed me when I found out that when Sir Henry Wood of the Promenade Concerts died his funeral was at Hitchin's St Mary's Church for some reason and then his body was taken back to London. And sticking with St Mary's, the crypt there was once used by the Roundheads to keep Royalist soldiers locked up.
Then there are the things you hear about a network of tunnels under the town that link the Priory with the Church. Most of that has been disproved, but every so often you come across something and think there's got to be something to it. I've visited the basement of one or two shops around Market Place and all of a sudden come across what certainly seems like a bricked-up underground corridor!
And at the back of the George pub there's a big fireplace and if you look up the big chimney you'll find a priest hole from during the Civil War where priests trying to escape from the opposing forces would hide on a little ledge halfway up until they'd gone. Later fires would be lit to try to smoke out anyone hiding up there.
So there's loads of facts and folklore! There can't not be in a town that dates officially from 792 when good old King Offa of Mercia first put a house of worship on the St Mary's site. Some visitors from abroad struggle to understand that 792 is even a year! It's quite something. And that's why St Mary's is so impressive.
I would always encourage people to do one of Derek Wheeler's Ghost Walks, which are absolutely fascinating, or one of Terry Knight's Historic Walks.
How many do you have working with you at the Initiative?
Hitchin Initiative is me and Cherry! Cherry has been working here since day one and predates me. This office actually opened in October 1995 and Julie Parkinson was Town Centre Manager here before. Her background was more tourism than retail though. I think her husband's work took him back up to their native Sunderland so she went back there, and I thank her so much for doing that!
What do people most commonly come into your office and ask?
Have you got a bus timetable? We're the only place that stocks public transport information except for the library perhaps.
We're trying to be all things to all members. The office has sort of developed into a one-stop shop for tourist information, souvenirs, transport information, community groups' information, business information, and we're the home for Business Link interviews locally and things like that. We also give a certain amount of local authority information but not enough. We keep suggesting to them that they make us a drop-off point because there's no local authority office here now - it's all in Letchworth and not everybody wants to go to Letchworth surprisingly enough. Nothing has come of this yet, but give it another couple of years and somebody will think it's a good idea!
We officially open to the public 9.30am to 1.30pm Monday to Saturday, but we exclude Wednesday now because we just weren't getting any work done. Over the last count that we did, which was a couple of years ago now so it's probably even more, we had 8,000 personal callers that year and that's without the emails and phone calls!
Can you describe an average day in the job?
There's no such thing!
I thought you might say that! So what happened yesterday then and what are your plans for the long weekend?
Yesterday I did a Rotary breakfast at 7am, was out and about till about 11 and then back here for calls and appointments until 1pm when I had a lunchtime meeting. Then we were busy trying to get the June Town Centre News newsletter done. I also did a flyer for the Hitchin Hospital Garden Party that's happening on 21 July and went out and got some local businesses to sponsor that so we can actually make a profit on it and give the money to the hospital which gets so little from anybody. Then when we finished here we went to a reception for the launch of the new business in Sun Street - Norgans Lettings & Property Management, which has a property sales office in Brand Street. It's their first full day of opening today.
Then this morning we were out on the Market Place at about quarter past eight because we had St Mark's Church out there with their cake stall. Hitchin Art Club was out there too. There's something out there every week and people often want tables and gazebos put up. The local arts and crafts market is out there every Sunday now, but we've given them their own keys so they can sort themselves out which is quite nice.
Tomorrow afternoon there's a tribute concert at the Hitchin Cricket Club with the Beached Boys so I'll wander up there and give that a bit of support. And with Monday being a bank holiday I might lock myself in the office and work on a presentation I've got to do for South Shields because the phones and emails will be quiet.
And then at some point over the weekend I must do some ironing and the basic domestic chores!
What are the biggest changes you've seen since to Hitchin since you've been here?
Well, certainly an uptake on properties. When I first got here there were an awful lot of empty retail units. In Churchgate there was a load as I mentioned earlier. And in Hermitage Rd when I first got here there were nine. There are actually two or three empty now, which I think is indicative of a slight downturn of the retail economy in general, but Hermitage Road has been full for quite a while during my ten years of office if you like. It's actually quite cyclical. We've got an O2 phone shop going into the old House of Flowers unit and when people groan that it's another phone shop I remind them that about seven or eight years ago we had five phone shops in Hitchin anyway. What goes around comes around!
We've also seen a huge boom in café culture. It's not that we've got masses more eating and drinking places, I think they're just more noticeable. And because they're newer and some of them are multinationals, they're more assertive in the market place about grabbing market share so they have if you like a stronger presence. Prezzo's may be another Italian but it was Burger King before so we've actually just moved things slightly upmarket. Strada coming in is also moving the town slightly upmarket despite it being a chain. And the Indian Restaurant Sitar-2 went into the former Wimpy unit.
So I think the café culture and I think the number of units that we've seen filled. And fortunately, touch wood, units don't tend to stay empty too long. So that's all been good.
On a community side, I'd say the growth of Hitchin Festival, which used to be just two weeks and we struggled to fill that sometimes. Now it's spread over four weekends and three weeks and choc-a-block with things - so we're very chuffed about that. In actual fact Hitchin Festival is now as long as the Edinburgh Fringe. It doesn't obviously have as many events because it hasn't got as many venues, but in a time perspective it's certainly as long. And there's a very, very good programme this year - I'm very excited about it. June/July is a very busy time of year for the town. I almost think June/July from an activity point of view is probably busier than Christmas now.
Plus I think the Christmas lights are staggeringly different. When I first got here and started going round introducing myself and asking shops what their issues were it was April and they were still moaning about Christmas - the late-night shopping was rubbish and the Christmas lights were rubbish because they were really just strings of light bulbs. We were able to address that fairly soon. I've never been a great fan of late-night shopping evenings because you can put a lot of effort into what is effectively two hours' extra trading each day for independents - multinationals open late anyway - and it costs quite a lot to do and nobody was going in the shops anyway because they were all on the streets for the entertainment.
I can remember being a retailer myself in Wokingham and doing Christmas late-night shopping. You sat behind your counter, drank your own wine and ate your own mince pies, and no bugger came through the door because they were all out singing carols and having hot roast chestnuts and things!
So we changed late-night shopping to all day Sunday and made it Gala Day. A lot of the independents still didn't open on Sundays and we have at least now got them opening on two or three Sundays before Christmas. We've also built a programme of events to fill the Sundays up and got the market to come out onto the streets the Sunday before Christmas as well. It's been about trying to build a programme of events through December, a bit like we do for Hitchin Festival except that it can't have such high impact because of course the weather in December isn't so conducive to outdoor trading. Anyway, people were very pleased and we now produce a What's On booklet for December and print something like 52,000 of them. People are very supportive of that.
Now what we're trying to do is build up the actual Switch-on of the Christmas Tree Lights. We've been very fortunate the last couple of years. John Bardon (Jim Branning from Eastenders) switched on the lights in 2005 - he was living in Offley at the time and friends knew him so they brought him in. And then of course last year Martha Ross moved into the town centre and got her son Paul Ross (elder brother of presenter Jonathan Ross) to come and do the Christmas Tree Lights Switch-on.
Would you class these as your best achievements?
There's a few good news stories. We get little wins every so often, but we're not resourced in any way other than what we can raise out of the community. We spent £28,000 last year on Christmas lights for example and that all had to be raised out of the community with support from Hitchin Committee.
We've got a new fountain coming into the river, which I think is a lovely story. We hope for a switch-on on July 1st. It will be a smaller version of the Letchworth one and so you won't see any superstructure above the water, you'll just see the jets coming out. That fountain has looked a bit sad and sorry for a while I'm afraid. It's starting to crumble badly, it has pools of stagnant water in it and there are birds building nests there - not ideal.
And a few years back we pulled together a whole raft of funding from different areas and cleaned all the chewing gum from the streets. People simply couldn't believe the difference - they thought it was fantastic and said that they never knew the street was that colour! Nothing else I've done has had such a major impact!
I think the more the Initiative can do to engage with businesses in Hitchin, the more it will encourage them to invest in the town themselves.
Where would you like to see Hitchin in 20 years time?
Still pre-eminent in North Hertfordshire as the place to be. And I'd like to think we could have done something with Churchgate within the next 20 years!
I do think that generally we are heading the right way, so I suppose more of the same. There are some keen guardians of the heritage anyway who we've talked about before. The fact that the whole town centre is now a conservation area does help in terms of what can now be developed.
We are a very defined town centre. You've got Bridge and Tilehouse streets at one end, Nightingale Road down the far end, the length of Bancroft and obviously all the historical core, and then you've got Queen Street and Paynes Park. If we could just keep some of the through traffic out of the historic core I think that would help it. You've only got to look at the state of the paving slabs and the highways to know that some big lorries are coming through. So I think we will have to address issues like extending the high street pedestrianisation to other days of the week and get deliveries before 10 or after 4 - other towns manage to do that.
I would also like to see some resolution on commercial waste collection because I think that is a problem. Because the service was deregulated in the 1980s sometimes we can have a Shanks lorry, followed by a Biffa lorry followed by a Serviceteam lorry coming right into the historic core to pick up a different bin from a different shop and you think there has got to be a better way of doing this. And we don't encourage commercial waste recycling because commercial waste doesn't contribute to the council's recycling target.
So there's masses still to do, but I do think that generally speaking we are moving in the right direction, but at times not as fast as I would like.
Do you see Hitchin's demographics changing?
I suppose Hitchin more so because of its profile - Historic Market Town - tends to attract what we call the ‘grey pound'. And there is huge spending power in that because this current generation have tended to retire earlier and have had greater assets and disposable income. I'm not sure that that's going to continue with the way the economy is now, but at the moment that's why there's been lots of flats being built in the town centre.
We are also of course in big commuter country. And as I said earlier we need to satisfy their aspirations too. We don't want them coming back from London and going shopping or for their entertainment somewhere else. We need to be able to provide it as close to their home as possible.
If you weren't in the field of town centre management what would you do?
People say I should be on stage! But I'd probably be in politics. I sneakily stood for council once, many years ago. And in the heady flirty days of the SDP I got on the national list of parliamentary candidates for the SDP, but I gave it all up when I opened my business and I've not revisited it.
One of my interests is politics/current affairs both here and in America. I've always been interested in American history - it was one of my A-level specialists - so I've loads of books and biographies on American politicians. I actually think I'm sad enough to be able to remember all the American presidents from George Washington to current day!
If you could invite any three people to dinner who would it be?
It depends what sort of mood I'm in! I think Gore Vidal, Miriam Margolyes and Stephen Fry.
I think Gore Vidal's probably a bit of an old cantankerous sod now, but if he was on good form he would be interesting.
Gore Vidal goes back years and is a wealth of gossip about American political life. He's distantly related to Al Gore. He once stood for senate in the 60s in California and he was very close to the Kennedys and he's been involved in American political life since the 50s I should think. So he's a tremendous gossip about that sort of stuff. And he's written some great books.
Miram Margolyes because she's a very knowledgeable, funny, witty woman. Maureen Lipman and Judi Dench are other possibilities. But Miriam Margolyes is completely irreverent. I can remember seeing her years ago and she was just so Un-PC it was wonderful. And of course she's a great aficionado and a huge expert on Charles Dickens. She did a wonderful series tracing Dickens' journeys to the United States.
Stephen Fry gets very passionate about things and I like his work. The latest thing he has got passionate about in the newspapers is reality TV shows. He certainly doesn't pull his punches at all. And I like that in people. I like people who get passionate about things. When I saw Miriam she was passionate about not being PC - it's the shock factor isn't it. And Gore Vidal has always been passionate to a point. I think sometimes we tend to be very British and worry about saying something that might upset somebody. But I think that if you are passionate about something and you do believe it then you should have the courage of your convictions to say it. If I want to be self-critical I think sometimes I'm too tactful.
Which prominent person in Hitchin should I interview next and why?
Judi Billing. She's Chair of the Hitchin Committee. Still. She's been a councillor for over 20 years. She's hugely committed to the town as is her huge extended family of children and grandchildren. I think she's a superb councillor. Part of her work is involved in the Improvement Development Agency, so she visits other local authorities to advise them on how to engage with the community and on lots of other issues. I think she's fantastic.
Her son, Ben Smith, is a blues guitarist. You might see Ben at any number of functions. In fact he'll be at the Beached Boys do tomorrow, and I've seen him in Pizza Express before on a Tuesday night. He also plays in a band called the Blues Agents. He's been playing professionally for years and he's superb.
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